Look at all these copyrights I don't own.
Himura sat in a chair at a large meeting table, Suzaku on the other side, and Dr. Tatopoulus to the man's right. They had been looking over a datapad, making notes and discussing the changes, with Tatopoulus occasionally glancing off in an apparently random direction for a few seconds before going back to the pad. Himura just sat, not sure what he was supposed to be doing. Suzaku had called him in to discuss their cooperation he'd agreed upon, and he'd spent a good 8 minutes after being ushered in just sitting and watching the two men talk. After another minute passed, the two men seemed to agree on something, and Suzaku handed the pad to Himura.
"I want you to take a look at this and tell me what is wrong with it." Suzaku said calmly.
Himura looked it over, scrolling up and down through what seemed to be half math equation, half blueprint. He stopped at a line that seemed to be an energy flow directed to enhance a separate flow.
"Here." He pointed to it, drawing a small correction note on a small list to the side. "This energy expenditure is a third of a percent too high. It'll destabilize the effect after a few seconds."
"Good. Continue."
He looked again, going over what seemed to be the most important stats. "Here, this is a tenth of a percent too low. It won't be able to sustain the reaction properly. And here, this needs to be on a slightly lower frequency. And then this later frequency needs to be increased to compensate. And this, here, this isn't a large enough power input. It needs to be boosted by three watts.
"And what material is being used for this conduit, number sixteen?" He asked, already sure he knew.
"SXR titanium alloy." Tatopoulus answered, watching him intently.
"That won't be enough to withstand this force variable. It needs an increased density."
"Triulxilia?" Suzaku queried, eyes flashing with understanding.
"Right. You'll need to increase the total material by half a tonne along the entirety of this length, but it'll hold up much better, to at least three consecutive activations." Himura said with a nod.
"I see. Yes, that makes sense." Nick said, looking at Suzaku. "I see your reasoning for him."
"Indeed, his insight is impeccable. You should study him for mutation."
Himura looked at the data for a few seconds before looking up in confusion. "Did you just make a joke?"
"As always, your powers of perception are astounding." Suzaku deadpanned.
Himura just looked at him for a few moments, shrugged, and went back to studying the datapad. Another few minutes passed, a tweak there, an increase there, and soon it became apparent that whatever this was wasn't a normal project. The materials required, the energy requirements, the mathematics. All of it pointed to something seriously out of the ordinary, even for an anti-kaiju project. Ticking another figure up one decimal, Himura stopped for a second to analyze his change, looking closely at it.
"This math's not right." He said, pushing it slightly towards Suzaku and Nick so they could see where he was pointing. "This energy output is too large. You can't get this sort of reaction out of a maser array."
"It is not a maser, Himura." Suzaku said, glancing at Nick. "And the math is not wrong."
Himura looked down at it again, checking all of his previous changes and formula to see if he'd missed something. "But that's not possible. This effect, right here, you can't get that, not even with a nuclear reaction. The energy required...would be..."
He stopped, looking at the math, eyes widening slightly. He looked back over everything, taking note of a few key points, writing notes on the side in a list of strange components, inputs, outputs, frequencies, over and again things that didn't make sense in any traditional weapon, even a mecha. Material requirements didn't make sense, they were too large even for a fortress-class. The energy requirement was more than any traditional reactor could put out, he'd never even heard of something that could put this much out, not even the American experimental Jaeger engine.
Then he caught it.
He thought it had been a typo, a misplaced decimal or some such. 120.0 meters. He checked further down the blueprint, catching three separate figures that confirmed his suspicion. Not 120, 1200. 8 times the size of the Gotengo, 4 times larger than even the Shinryu. He checked again, just to be sure, and there was no doubt. This thing was massive, rivaling the Vortaak ultra-submarine in size. The sheer cost of the materials alone was staggering, not to mention how many people it would take to crew, the expenses of arming it properly, how ludicrous operating its reactor would be.
He kept reading, making tiny changes as he went. He reached another grossly large energy figure, looked up at the two, looked back, kept reading. After the third of these figures, he rechecked the last two, wrote all three on the side, kept going. As he continued, the figures continued, growing larger and larger. He looked at the associated figures, the steady inputs, the slight increases in power, the increasingly large energy cost. A building reaction, a huge one. A truly impossible one, judging by the continually larger figures.
Then, he reached a series of calculations that he'd never even seen before. He had to take a moment just to be sure he hadn't somehow entered some other theoretical file. It wasn't simply an energy reaction figure, or some form of power generator. It was an entirely separate train of thought, not one involving mass or energy, but time and space. He watched as the figures painted a picture of an expanding field, contained within itself and yet somehow separated from everything else, not as a side effect, but as a function. The function, the most important function of this entire array.
With a manic fervor, he read everything, piecing together a picture he never thought he'd even have the chance to see. The most famous weapon ever devised by man, the most legendary and the most reviled. The weapon the had, above even the atomic bomb, rewritten the annals of history. Of which only one had ever been constructed. The weapon that was deemed a war crime of the highest order to even propose constructing.
"This...this is the Dimension Tide." He said, his eyes widening in horror. "This is a dimensional emitter. This...this is-"
"No, it's not." Dr. Tatopoulus said, taking the datapad, scrolling down, and handing it back. "Finish reading first."
Glancing at him for a moment, Himura went back to looking, now paying attention to every detail while also considering every aspect of the bigger picture. Slowly, the massive figures began to make sense. The materials needed, the energy requirements, the sheer size of the thing, the Dimension Tide effect. The DT wasn't the primary weapon, it was the safety feature! He finished reading through it, and handed it back, his hand shaking.
"This is...is this what I think it is?" He said, his voice soft.
"You know what this is, Himura." Suzaku said, looking over at Nick.
"But, this is insane! Something like this, even against monsters, it's a crime against nature itself!" He all but shouted, a numbness running down his spine.
"No, it is not." Suzaku said, before looking behind Himura. "Admiral Gordon, I believe you are on."
Himura spun, and sure enough, there was Gordon, standing at the doorway. The old man walked up and sat at the head of the table, pressing a button on the underside and calling up a display. The image immediately settled on a timeline of events, from the first firing of the Dimension Tide back in 2000 to the last firing in 2007.
"Kid, there's something we gotta go over before I can really explain what you just read." Gordon said, enlarging the last date. "Two thousand seven. The end of the Vortaak war. You would have been just a boy during that war, kid, so you couldn't remember how it was. The planet was is ruins, civilization was on the brink, people were losing all hope, the human race itself was on the brink of extinction. Four years of near constant struggle against alien elements, since the Xilian rebel forces attacked us and I took command of what was left of the EDF during and after operation Final War. The crystal radiation had wreaked havoc all over the globe, over three percent of the total landmass was completely rearranged, and over half of the major cities suffered some sort of damage, dozens being outright destroyed, such as the volcanic effects in Seattle and the seismic destruction of San Francisco. Places like London were completely destroyed. More than half the total EDF forces were destroyed in Final War alone, and casualties just kept up throughout the war. By the end of it, humanity was almost out of options.
"Then, we got a break. All the monsters had gathered on Monster Island, the crystal mutant Krystalak was pretty much eaten by SpaceGodzilla, which sucked all the crystal radiation right into that point. We had all of them, dozens of monsters, all in one place. We were able to lure them all to the Mariana Trench using the technology recovered from the Vortaak mothership, get them all as far from civilization as we could.
"And then, we fired the Dimension Tide. We erased them all from the face of the earth, trapped them in some other dimension. We freed the world from the monster threat entirely. You should have seen the command room when all the bio-signals vanished off our satellites. I've never seen people that happy. We thought we'd done it, finally freed the world from have a century of chaos. Humanity would survive."
Gordon sat, staring at Himura, waiting for him to say the obvious answer. He gulped, knowing what was expected, and answered.
"And then the Pacific Invasion began."
"Right. Not a month later, monsters began appearing out of the trench. The world went nuts. We'd lost all out mechs fighting the Vortaak, and every monster that could have helped had vanished into the dimensional rip. We were on our own, with no way to fight back. For months, we just took it, nothing more we could do. Coastal cities were ruined, thousands died, and trying to fight back revealed that we couldn't even kill them with what weapons we had because their damn blood would finish what the bodies started."
"And then the Jeager program was invented." Himura said, only to be stopped by a look from Gordon.
"Yeah, that's what people think. You think we trudged something like that up in a year? Hell no. The Jaeger program existed well before that. Back in nineteen eighty six, during the twelfth annual Efforts Against Giant Monsters Convention in Geneva. A German professor, Wilhelm Mercer, put forth the idea for a worldwide collaborative effort in combating giant monsters. His ideas were given merit, but on the whole deemed unnecessary. The technology simply wasn't there. Whatever we could make would have been worthless against the newly reemerged Godzilla, and so his ideas got him a prize, a speech, and nothing else. His ideas languished for twenty years, until a relative of his found his old notes near the end of the war. The old man had died six years after presenting his ideas, a year before the technology to create Mechagodzilla two was invented. Who knows how many lives could have been saved if the EDF had managed to find his notes sooner.
"Regardless, we found them, and put them into work as soon as the first kaiju walked out of that ocean and started killing people. We fought back, and scored the first real human-made kaiju kills. You should have seen the parades that were thrown, the events and museums and people. They'd thought for years they were all doomed, and were ready to just give up once our superweapon had backfired like that. But now, we had real weapons, ones controlled by humans, brave men and woman risking their lives, literally going out their and kicking kaiju ass. Faces people could believe in, ones that didn't look like our enemy, ones that all the nations of the world could make, since it didn't rely on alien tech, just some reverse-engineered know-how. The world had hope again. In the words of the Marshal, Lieutenant Commander Stacker Pentecost, 'Today, at the edge of our hope, at the end of our time, we have chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other.'"
Himura, and every schoolchild since 2014, knew the words by heart. "Today we face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them! Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse!"
"Damn right. Pentecost was a real soldier. Still miss him." Gordon grunted, then scrolled to a new page, the one that had gone down in history above all otters. "So, we fought back. We beat them out of our cities, we pushed them back into the ocean, and we took the fight to the rim itself. Operation Pacific Rim; Thirty Two Jaeger units piloted by seventy six individuals, backed up by damn near everything we could toss in with them. The true show of humanities power, beating back whatever threat the universe could throw at us
"We killed over a dozen kaiju around that trench, beating them down through superior numbers and firepower. It was the crowning moment of humanities struggles against the giant monster. We pushed in to the very edge of that trench, throwing the broken and bloody bodies of our enemies into the darkness. I was watching, sitting in that same damn chair, looking out through thirty two cameras as we tossed in a device made to close the wormhole. Made from the Dimension Tide tech, it didn't open any holes, just closed them. Damn thing worked like a charm. The portal closed, and took all those corpses with it."
Gordon looked up at the images, a small army of 200+ ft tall machines of war, walking out into the ocean to the screaming of millions.
"And then it spat something back out. Thirteen monsters that had gone in half a decade before, two hunks of scrap metal that used to be our Mechagodzilla's, and two creatures the world never needed to see." Gordon reached into his coat and pulled out a cigar, lighting it up with a lighter Himura never saw him draw. He took a long drag, blew out the smoke, then continued. "Godzilla, mutated almost beyond recognition, and something three times his size and pissed as unholy hell. Our Jaeger pilots recognized the one, knew what that meant for the other, and attacked." He took another smoke and practically spat it back out. "Six hours forty nine minutes. That's how long the battle took. We told the rest of the world the footage was lost due to the dimensional backlash. Told them our Jeagers fought for that long alongside Godzilla against that thing."
Himura knew this, the whole world did. The last great stand of the Jeagers alongside the returned "Super" Godzilla against a class VI monster later named Bagan.
"Load'a bullshit." Gordon said as he switched the image to what looked like a huge dome of blue light, the only public image of the end of the fight. "Thirteen minutes twelve seconds. That's how long they lasted. Half of them, including the vaunted Gipsy Danger, were wiped out in one attack. Thirty six men and woman, gone, just like that. The rest were destroyed like gnats, just swatted if they got too close. A few made a run for it and escaped. Two of the monsters that had emerged along with Godzilla and that thing died trying to help him, no more use than the Jaegers."
"Godzilla was there too, my Godzilla I mean." Tatopoulus said, looking at the same image. "He was practically dead, missing his left leg, most of his spines, over half of his skin. As he was recovering later we found he'd had over sixty percent of his skeleton broken. One of the Jaegers pulled him free, flew him to safety. It was the one out of Brazil. Stinger Minuano, piloted by Samuel Rodrigues. Godzilla had saved his family when he was younger, and he'd wanted to return the favor. He's the reason Godzilla even survived."
"He was a brave man. They all were." Gordon said sadly. "Out of the seventy six people sent, thirteen survived. Eight from Jaegers that had managed to escape, three from wrecks that hadn't been totally destroyed. Two had managed to eject. There were six others that had ejected, waiting for rescue when they got caught in the blast. We watched helpless as Godzilla fought that thing for six hours before he killed it in the largest nuclear event ever seen. They say you could see the glow from half the world away. I was half a mile underground when it went off, and all I saw was white as half the remaining screens went pure white. In the end, humanities greatest weapons were tossed aside like pebbles in a storm, utterly useless. We hid it from the world. There would have been panic, suicides, who knows what else. Humanity had spent half a decade recovering, fighting back, and all that was made useless by a single monster. We still don't know where the hell it even came from. What we do know is much worse."
Gordon flipped to another image, a large hunk of charred meat the size of a whale sitting in a lab surrounded by enough masers to disintegrate it outright. "The kaiju we'd been fighting matched the DNA found in the creatures remains. We ran experiments, found the truth. The monsters that had been attacking us all those years? Nothing more than bits of flesh that had fallen off while it had been fighting Godzilla God knows where, had fell through the crack that was the wormhole, and wound up on our side to regenerate. We'd been faced with extinction by nothing more that glorified skin cells, our greatest weapons goddamn cleanup!"
Gordon shut off the display, taking one last smoke before tossing it away. Himura just stared at him, the legendary admiral seeming to just age before is eyes. Suzaku slid the pad back to Himura and pressed a button, the data changing to a finished schematic.
"That is why we need this weapon. Because if something like Bagan ever attacks the Earth again, we will not have Godzilla here to defend it. To defend us."
"We need something that can defeat any foe, no matter how strong." Nick said, joining Suzaku. "Now more than ever, with these new alien monsters able to appear at any place and time."
Gordon stood up, picking up his walking cane, and hefting it over his shoulders like the sword it contained. "That's why we're gonna damn ourselves forever by making it. We're going to commit a crime against nature because the only alternative is to risk the death of not just the human race, but the planet itself."
He flipped the sheathed sword over and pointed at the finished image on the datapad, voice resolute. "That's why we need you to help us finish it. Because we don't have any other choice in the matter."
Himura looked at Gordon, then to Suzaku and Tatopoulus, then down at the image. A machine 1200 meters long, weighing 1,200,000 tonnes, wielding technologies revolutionary and utterly terrifying. The name stood boldly at the top, and Himura couldn't help a frightened laugh at how utterly fitting it all was.
Anti-Kaiju Weapon: EX Antimatter cannon Susanoo.